PC Building

[Axxemann]

So Project Spectre is coming along ever so slowly. Between work, getting everything lined up for my first of two hip replacement surgeries, trying to keep my home in decent shape and banging my head against the wall - figuratively -  on how to better run my tubing and get my flow meter/temp sensor mounted in such a way that I can see it and not have it look like trash (I'm leaning towards 3D printing a bracket to screw down to the floor) and the general vagaries of life... I had my smallest HDD die. Lucky for me I was able to recover 99% of the data off it with a little finagling. I decided it was a perfect time to get a new, biger HDD while I was at it. So off to Memory Express I go with my Visa card in hand. 

I've used Seagate and Western Digital for nigh on 20 years now as my go-tos for HDD storage. SSDs are a bit more varied with Kingston, Crucial, WD and Samsung. But we're talking about the old fashiond spinners today.

When I walked in I had a couple of options: Buy a pair of 8TB Barracudas that spin at 5400RPM and pull the dead 1TB Barracuda and my 2TB WD, or buy a single Ironwolf Pro 16TB that spins at 7200RPM and just swap the dead drive. Pretty much the same amount of storage, the single drive spins way faster meaning higher read/write speeds. And the neat part: There was a price difference of less than a dollar once all was said and done. So I slap down my Visa and out I walk with my shiny new 16TB Ironwolf Pro, and a Steelseries Aerox 9 (More on that in a seperate post.)

Fast forward a week to about 20 minutes ago when I finished mounting this new drive into Spectre. Did some rejiggering of my drive layout to facilitate the eventual upgrades of the other three 3.5" drives I have, swapping out a dead fan on the top rad (always have a couple of spares handy, kids!) and cleaning up some cable management. Got it set up as easy as can be, and started dumping files onto it. HOLY SMACK... THIS THING IS FAST! Is it as fast as an SSD? The cheap SATA ones I have, just about. My NVMEs? Not a chance. But in the last 20ish minutes I've been dumping files, I've been averaging 180-200MB/s from my 2TB WD to this monster. 15% of the drive's contents, and it was pretty much full to the brim.

But Axxe! Ironwolf are for NAS boxes, not your gaming rig!!!! Bollocks, I say. If a 3.5" HDD runs and is recognized, I'm gonna use it. It might be designed for constant uptime, but it'll work just fine in a desktop. Even my parts guy at MemEx uses an 8TB variant as his backup drive on his rig at home. I'll inevitably upgrade the rest of my HDDs as they near the end of their service lives, but as long as MoBo makers keep putting SATA III ports on the board, I'm gonna bloody well use them. My HDDs last on average 10-12 years. In the last 9 months I retired both of my 1TB drives, one was 12 and this last one was 10 years old. the 12 year old got replaced with an 8TB Barracuda that was on a steep discount, and the most recent one with the Ironwolf I bought last week. I think I'll be ponying up for more Ironwolf drives as the 2 and 4TB units I have start to hit retirement age. I think the WD will be getting swapped out in the next 2 years, maybe sooner if there's another good sale, and if the price is right, I'll grab two and do the 4TB at the same time.

So, if you have want or need for a really large capacity means of file storage, can't be bothered to set up a NAS, and are leery of the cloud like I am, and like things to go fast, don't sleep on the Ironwolf. They're on average about 20% more per GB, but it's worth it to me.

[BigAl01]

I guess if you have a large storage space requirement, the HDD is the way to go.  I've decided against storing my entire photo collection on each computer several years ago; now I just put a few pictures on the new builds and save the remaining space for games.  I haven't added a new HDD for several years now, but I've bought 3.5 inch SDDs when they go on sale to complement the M.2 NVME drives.  I think your Ironwolf is performing so well because it's empty and files can be copied continuously, rather than onto open sectors.  You'll fill it up eventually.  

[Axxemann]

It's also a CMR drive, so it's not just spinning faster, it's also not trying to fit pieces of data here and there in layers like and SMR drive. I'm currently sitting on close to 20TB of media that I want to hold on to. I've got just over 30TB to do it on. The way the NAND technology is coming along for storage, it's only a matter of time before that's the way to go in terms of reliability. But the big stumbling block right now is size available for non-enterprise consumers, and of course cost. A 3.5HDD that runs $400CAD will be around 16TB in size. An SSD (Sata or NVME) will be only 4TB. There is some decent parity around the 2TB and lower mark... or at least there used to be.

I'd kill for an 8TB or larger M.2 that went for under $250CAD. Speed wouldn't be the biggest thing for me, either. You could set the read/write around 2000MB/s, which is pretty slow by PCIe Gen 4 standards, and probably even Gen 3 (I never really looked that much into it.) Even at those "leisurely" speeds, they'd still smoke just about any spinning drive out there that uses a SATA interface.

Or how about we split the difference? Ditch the SATA interface all together. Build HDDs with minimum 7200RPM speeds, a PCIe interface that we can slot into either an X1 lane, or enable bifurcation on an X4 m.2 slot using an adapter. It effectively doubles the read/write speed of the drive given the limitations of SATA.